Save Money on Health Insurance!

Welcome to the New Healthcare Law Center and State News

The new healthcare law, called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), represents comprehensive healthcare reform legislation signed into law on March 23, 2010. It contains numerous provisions designed to protect consumers and promote low cost medical insurance, including many new taxes to pay for the cost.

In this section of the site, you can also obtain the following information specific to your state: available medical insurance options, efforts to regulate medical insurance premiums, healthcare, the individual medical insurance marketplace and the new healthcare law.

Our objective is to help Americans make sense of the new healthcare law by explaining key provisions in plain English and assisting individuals, families and the self-employed in using this information to find and secure affordable medical insurance.

Under the new healthcare law, called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, states are required to establish a public program, called the Pre Existing Condition Insurance Plan to provide medical insurance to individuals who have been denied health insurance (must also be a U.S. citizen or legal resident of California and not had insurance for at least six months prior to enrolling). The rates for California’s Pre Existing Condition Insurance Plan unexpectedly announced a rate reduction.

The federal government foots most of the bill and recently gave the state, which runs the program, permission to lower rates. Also, starting this month, the 3,500 existing subscribers will see their monthly insurance bills fall an average of 18%. Some will get the maximum 24% break.

For Kristian Magnani, an unemployed graduate student from Duarte, the rate cut will pare $70 from his monthly insurance bill, dropping it from $288 to $218. Magnani, 33, has a congenital back disorder and went without medical insurance coverage for more than a year before he discovered the California Pre Existing Condition Insurance Plan when it debuted in October 2010, according to The Los Angeles Times.

“I’m just trying to get by,” he said. “For me, $70 a month in my pocket is huge.”

The safety-net medical insurance plan targets individuals, families and the self employed like Magnani who have been unable to find or afford health insurance in the individual medical insurance market because of existing health conditions.

Currently, health insurance companies in that market can reject subscribers or charge high rates to those with even minor medical problems such as hay fever or back pain.

The Pre Existing Condition Insurance Plan is viewed as a temporary solution for such people until 2014, when insurers can no longer reject policyholders or charge more for those who are sick.

“The whole purpose is to help people get out of a cycle of being uninsured,” said Jeanie Esajian, a spokeswoman for the state agency that runs the program. “It keeps money in their pocket.”